5. True Stories (1986)

There’s a scene in True Stories, the film from which this album sprung, in which David Byrne walks around the fictional town of Virgil, Texas in a Hollywoodish mockup of a cowboy outfit and says to the audience, “They sell a lot of these around here, but I never see anyone else wearing them.”

It might be fair to attribute the absolute curveball that is True Stories (the record) to the same sentiment: it’s arresting to hear Talking Heads drenched in source material no one was playing in the ’80s. Where did all that music come from? Though the group had already replanted the American pop stylings of their previous work when recording Little Creatures, this record is in many ways a very long reach back to the crazy-person embrace of pop history from 77, using pop forms the same way David Lynch does — to impart that feeling you get when accosted by a homeless man: you want to trust but some part of you is guiltily expecting danger.

But unlike the anemic borrowing on Little Creatures, True Stories presents the spittle-spouting preacher of Americana, with tracks like “Wild Wild Life”and “People Like Us” just barely skirting radio gaga in favor of manic celebrations of sameness and a false sense of peace.

So much of the mystery is gone: no more urban nightmares or youthful sensuality. Left is the Bible-beating (in the “overcoming” sense of beating) gospel of “Puzzling Evidence” imploring you: “Now don’t you wanna get right with me?” There’s that very rich, contemporary complexity that can only come from being inside of the thing with which you battle as an artist.